Performance Anxiety in which I'm struggling to get myself to practice my piano lessons regularly, with some recent success. I love to play the piano, if I'm playing anything I know well, but I have a really hard time learning to play anything new - the reason I finally decided to take lessons.

Happy News in which I received permission to stay in Canada for another six months

Dogs Covet in which neither one of a pair of beagles is satisfied with what they have, they each want what the other one's got

Bonita's parents are visiting from Newfoundland. On Canada Day (July 1) we drove to Halifax in the afternoon, had supper down by the harbor, and then attended the Nova Scotia International Tattoo. It was quite an incredible show, worth a trip to Nova Scotia just to see it. There were performers from all over the world, as far away as Australia and Russia.

Afterwards we watched the fireworks over the harbor.

I'm still being barraged with the zafi.b virus, although I am able to eventually receive my email, after I filter it out myself using a procmail script that deletes messages with certain subject lines.

My hosting service had an open source virus scanner called clamav installed for a little while, which works very well to eliminate all the viruses, but unfortunately it required so much CPU time that their mail server wasn't able to handle the load, so they had to disable it. Ironically, I think they were overloaded because they are receiving so many viruses.

Scanning every email message to check if it's got a virus isn't the most efficient thing to do though. One can check for certain attachment types, or certain subject lines, and delete most viruses more efficiently. I just posted a question to the clamav-users mailing list to ask for advice on doing this, maybe you have some tips for me too.

Although I'm now able to eventually receive my email at my usual address, until the virus onslaught is dealt with, I'm asking people to email me instead at spam_me_silly2003@yahoo.com which is, rather ironically, an account I registered so I could sign up at websites that I expected to send me spam.